New Safe Memory Reclamation feature in UMA
Jeff Roberson
jroberson at jroberson.net
Sat Jan 25 18:58:29 UTC 2020
Hello Folks,
I want to make the larger community aware of a substantial feature coming
to UMA soon. The review is at https://reviews.freebsd.org/D22586 along
with some perf results.
SMR is a technique that allows for various types of lockless
synchronization by eliminating use-after-free hazards. This is in the
same family as RCU/QSBR/EPOCH/Parsec. There is quite a lot of material
available on the uses of these algorithms.
Most of these algorithms suffer from holding on to freed memory for a
relatively long period of time and reclaiming it when it's cache-cold.
This also creates quite a lot of resource starvation edge cases. This is
evident by the amount of code in RCU on linux intended to work around
these issues. These algorithms are generally best with a small write/free
workload and a very heavy read workload.
For the virtual memory system I needed something that could sustain
relatively rapid frees. I have ended up with a scheme that integrates
with the allocator and uses a novel epoch/version tracking mechanism.
The pair of these gives me 3x faster performance with 1/20th the memory
overhead of our existing epoch implementation in my obviously contrived
perf test. I do not want to imply that if we replaced the network epoch
with uma smr the network stack would go 3x faster. I do think there may
be benefits there especially for things with high turnover like pcbs. I
do not yet have support for sleepable sections so there is a lot of
technical space between here and there.
There is a lot of information in the review and comments in the code. I
will be validating on weaker memory ordering architectures. I need to
write a man page. I would like to find a snappy name to avoid confusion
with other algorithms. If anyone has suggestions I am open to it.
Thanks,
Jeff
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